Constantine IX of Byzantium

Constantine IX of Byzantium (1000-1055) was the Emperor of the Byzantine Empire from 1042 to 1055, succeeding Zoe of Byzantium and preceding Basilissa Theodora.

Biography
Constantine was born in 1000 to the Orthodox Christian Greek House of Monomachos, and he married the niece of Emperor Romanus III of Byzantium. He was exiled for conspiring against Emperor Michael IV of Byzantium, also known as "the Paphlagonian", but on 11 June 1042 he married Empress Zoe of Byzantium, the widow of Michael. He fought the rebel George Maniakes, who led his Italian army into the Balkans and nearly defeated Constantine if he had not been killed in 1043. Yaroslav I of Kiev sent his son Vladimir of Novgorod to lead a fleet to attack Constantinople almost immediately after the death of Maniakes, but it was repulsed. In 1048, Constantine was the first Byzantine emperor to make contact with the Seljuk Empire, meeting them at the Battle of Kapetron, where they won a tactical victory but lost the battle strategically. In 1047 his nephew Leo Tornikios rebelled in Adrianople with the support of Thrace, but he blinded him after defeating him, and he proceeded to defeat an attack by the Pechenegs. At the end of his reign, the Normans of Robert Guiscard conquered southern Italy] in the absence of Maniakes, and Constantine died in 1055. He was succeeded by Zoe's sister [[Basilissa Theodora.